The word “hustler” gets a lot of grief. Most of the people we associate with the word bring negativity, strife, betrayals, and nonsense. I believe the word is misread colloquially. The Merriam-Webster entry lists two meanings: a prostitute and an aggressively enterprising person. I think, in modern parlance, we tend to split the difference and land somewhere in between. If I take my own spin on it, I track the moving target of a person who can find no rest in mediocrity, a soul imbued with purpose. However vain or altruistic, or both, the hustler’s ride into the sunset isn’t over until the sun is caught.
Few retail entities in Richmond can boast the impact and beloved legacy of Kulture Clothing. Kulture has played a role in Richmond counterculture that can be easily understated when you see the overgrown mounds and ditches of battlefields made decades past. The landscape of Richmond’s current weed culture, DJ, EDM, local hip-hop scenes, and availability of luxury glassworks would be altered dramatically without their journey.
What you’d be missing is the story of a few capital-H hustlers slipping just a few steps ahead of the law to provide RVA with the base coat on some of its most colorful countercultures. Their approach to the scenes they served was to see them as multifaceted. They created a retail home that would cater to the denizens of Richmond’s club scenes in ways that no poser to the lifestyle could ever replicate. Kulture would reflect them in full, from their clothes to their music, from the racks of fresh tees in the large Shockoe Bottom windows to the rows of crystalline bongs on their walls. They would build their brand around the scene, less like a fence, more like an embrace with a backslap. They would take the risks and the responsibilities of getting the tokers of RVA a proper shop with cred, class, and community. Doing so in full view of the cops took some balletic maneuvering and strict adherence to the letter, if not the spirit, of the law—and a lot of brass between their legs.
Twenty-five years ago, when Evan Somogyi, then co-owner of Shockoe Bottom’s legendary nightclub Area 51, conceived of Kulture, Richmond was not ready to embrace the purple haze. His visits to a friend’s head shop in Florida inspired him to try his luck at changing the entire pace of the conversation around recreational blazing. Evan describes the times:
“In Florida, from the time I could legally get into them, I was going to head shops for papers and bowls, etc. When I moved to Richmond, there was no place to buy even a glass pipe. You needed to go to Belt Boulevard, go into some sketchy store, go to the back room—just for a cheap acrylic bong. It was all hidden.
I started going back down to Florida several times a year, meeting friends, going to parties. A buddy of mine had a shop next to a record store that catered to the club scene. It was more hip-hop influenced with a little bit of rave streetwear clothing. He had a tiny, tiny little amount of glass. I don’t even know if he sold bongs, but he sold papers.
I had a bar in downtown Richmond called Area 51. I had been throwing parties there. There was a point in time when I saw the bar going into a downward spiral and needed an off-ramp from the mayhem. John Yamashita, my old partner, had already opened up Sticky Rice. We had open bar tabs where people owed us tens of thousands of dollars, you know? It just wasn’t happening anymore. I’m like, ‘You know what, I want to do something to cater to this scene without being the scene.’ And so I got with my buddy that owns the store in Florida and was like, ‘Hey, you know I want to do something like this in Virginia. But I want to focus on glass and accessories too.’ So I went down to a trade show, Surf Expo in Orlando. I stocked up on similar fashion designers he repped in his store, like UFO and Third Rail, and soon found the first Kulture Klothing retail space downtown. We stocked up primarily on raver and hip-hop clothing but bought our first weed accessories then and there.”
I remember checking in with the beat cops in the area saying “Hey, I’m opening up the store. I don’t want to get arrested for selling these things.” And they were like, “well technically, they’re not illegal. You know, you can sell them for legal purposes. You know, Virginia law was like, you know, if you’re selling it for weed, it’s paraphernalia. It’s illegal to sell paraphernalia. You can’t sell a bong. Bongs are paraphernalia. So we opened up, we put ‘em on the shelf and called them water pipes. For tobacco. Yeeeahh, for tobacco.”
It was a countercultural win for the rest of us that enjoyed a good blunt. Through sheer defiance and a neat little dance around semantics, Evan was able to skirt the po-po and tie them up in their own rhetorical leash. This sounds pretty basic when just described this way but you have to imagine the many thousands of dollars invested into a company whose legality centers around whether or not their product is called a bong or a water pipe. As silly as this sounds, they not only had to refrain from calling the glass “bongs” in any official capacity, but they had to prohibit even their customers from calling them that too.
Imagine having to kick out a customer for looking at a bong on a shelf and saying, “How much is that bong?” According to Evan, this is something they’d have to do on a daily basis. It is a miracle they’re still around. If they hadn’t diversified with the clothing and, later, an ill-fated record store, they’d be their own worst enemies on the sales floor. As much as it would break their brains to kick out a paying customer who hadn’t gotten the anti-password memo, the store’s future solely depended on giving no quarter to those who broke the codespeak and uttered the word “bong” in the store.
“We threw people out multiple times a day. There was no ‘Okay, this time we’ll let that slide.’ You were out. Yeah, bawling your eyes out? Sorry. You gotta leave and come back another day. Yeah. Have a Nice Day Café, the massive music venue from forever ago, was open across the street at the time. You had all these clubs in the Bottom that you had to have a collared shirt to go into. So, we bought fucking cheap-ass collared shirts for, like, seven dollars apiece and sold them for $30. I remember all the walls in the store were tagged with graffiti. We had a DJ store in the back of the place too. Shockoe Bottom was awesome back then. We were open till 2 a.m.”
Kulture became the rallying point for DJ, rave, and weed countercultures, and fame was soon to follow. To tell the story of Kulture Klothing without the influence of its most visible ambassador and soon-to-be maestro of its continuing success, Jimmy Conway, would leave you with the least interesting parts of the tale. Jimmy enters the mix:
“I met Evan on my 21st birthday at Area 51. I think I was making my own mixed drink at the end of the bar. Evan said, ‘Hey, man, you can’t do that here.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, sorry.’ And then I slept on his couch for like two weeks after that. We wound up becoming friends at Sticky Rice. That’s basically how it all started for us working together. Eighteen years ago now.”
After several years of being homies, Evan felt Jimmy had earned his shot at leading this enterprise he clearly understood and thrived in. It was time for Jimmy to join the team, managing the Shockoe store and soon to GM the eventual chain of locations under the burgeoning retail empire.
The second phase of Kulture was about to begin. Evan and Jimmy decided to further represent the cultures they were consistently seen as the glue in by converting the upstairs of the Shockoe location into a record store. They expanded their streetwear presence by printing their own graphic tees, establishing relationships with some of the best designers of the era, and building out from one small cabinet of glass smoking implements into several shelves—until it became impossible to ignore their curatorial prowess within the market.
What started as a wink under the table to the smokers of Richmond became a dedication to quality products hard to find anywhere else—much less in Virginia. Evan recounts how, when they got into the high-end bubbler, bong, and sculptural contraptions popularized by luxury weed culture, their name in the wider national market began to grow. What was once a sideshow to their apparel brand dovetailed into their reputation for being the hub for DJ culture in town. Adding awesome to infamy, they were consistent sponsors and hosts of the best parties—bootleg and above board—complementing and spearheading the other collectives and media entities (like this one you’re reading right now) that created the RVA vibe. That vibe was created out of whole cloth, an invention of the most courageous and determined entrepreneurs on the James. Being culturally associated with Kulture was a big reason brands like LRG and Diesel did business with Chew On This magazine—whose goodwill would transfer over into the beginnings of the RVA magazine brand.
“We opened as a clothing store, but we were refilling the ‘glass’ case every week. So, we built another case. The market for an excellent smoking apparatus was even bigger than we thought. Then we started selling the records. We turned the apartment upstairs into a record store. And then, I guess we had to have employees so they could run upstairs. It was kind of crazy up there. Then we noticed that the scene we helped create was shifting. The clothing brands we were carrying weren’t selling as well as they were before. We had opened a store in Carytown that was only clothes, nothing else. We ended up closing that store after only six months. When we saw the writing on that wall, we moved all the records down to the basement and started focusing on glass more.”
All of this expansion into the high end glass scene was still fraught with the threat of an aggressive RPD breathing down their necks about the still questionably legal products being sold. Jimmy added:
“Yeah, we never had to go to court. I don’t think we ever got fined. No, right? Nothing. We just had to do a lot of warning and had to be on our peace. We just had to be serious about kicking people the fuck out. You smell like you were hotboxing in the car on the way in to see us? Get out. You’re gone now. Understand there’s no feeling bad about that right? It’s like you gotta go. You gotta go. You’re not closing my store. I got employees.
It was a lot of word of mouth in the beginning. It was all defined by friends and people knowing us and encouraging them to just come by and visit us at this cool store where everyone involved in their cool subcultures would come to gear up. But, invariably, it would all have to come down to ‘Look dude, don’t say bong when we get into the shop.’”
In around 2003/4, there was a whole national newsworthy string of stings, busts, and raids on head shops as if they were like some cartel. Tommy Chong got arrested, Jerome Baker got busted. There was one attorney in Pennsylvania that was on about “smoke shops support terrorism” etc, it was a whole thing. We thought we were done. But that’s also when there was a lot of status within the scene for high-end, luxury glass pieces. In contradiction to the policing trend I guess. People started spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on their home pieces. Lucky for us, we sold them.
We were pretty much done with clothes, minus, like, t-shirts. We started making our own. It was full-blown glass at the downtown store. We moved all the records down to the basement. I don’t even know how Charlottesville got talked about, but we opened up in Charlottesville in 2007. Actually, we just kept on having people ask us to open out there. We had a good run there. We ran out our lease term, nine years. We decided it was time to just get out of there. I remember in 2006 when I was scouting Southside for a new store, all of the spots I went to see kept telling us they didn’t want us there. So we opened up in Charlottesville.”
Evan’s recollection brings home the hustle in motion.
“Records were dying as a part of our business. When Hurricane Gaston came through, it flooded the basement where the records were, so that was the end of that. I think we had a $1 record sale and never looked back. I forget about Carytown being a second store. But when you ask me what the second store is, I’ll say Charlottesville because, yeah, you know, six months of this with $0 days, sleeping in the store on the floor to make sure it’d be open in the morning? That kind of stuff? Carytown doesn’t count.
In 2009, right before my son was born, we opened up Hull Street. To rewind a bit, when I told my family and friends that I was going to sell glass, even at the first store, my then-girlfriend (now my wife), and pretty much everyone close to me said I was crazy. Said I’d go to jail. So when I said I wanted to open a store in the burbs, in ‘Arrestafield’ (Chesterfield), we opened on 4/20, 2009. How do you do stuff like this? You just do it.
Like literally everything on the face of the Earth, social media changed the game for the company. Kulture became a brand leader in the high-end glass industry. It wasn’t long before their reputation began to precede them and notoriety came their way. There was a trend in high-quality glass art, and Kulture was one of the biggest buyers and sellers in it. What once was purely a word-of-mouth expansion of influence in this scene turned into a Facebook-ready business model. Customers would routinely come in to see new one-of-a-kind pieces from heralded artists and brands like Illadelph, RooR, Sheldon Black, snap a photo, put it on Facebook, and we’d end up selling it within half an hour. People would come in and look at our displays as if we were a gallery. The enthusiasm for these things seemed limitless, and our customers were willing to pay whatever for them. Like any trend that intense, this started dying after a while. So now we’re stuck with all this, what are we going to do with it?
Also, what happened with that scene is that we were still kinda illegal here. Colorado legalized, and we lost like all of our clientele.”
How does one compensate for that? You don’t. You innovate, adjust, pivot, and move on. Which is exactly what they did. Fashionable weed strains took the spotlight from fashionable bongs, and the delivery device became an afterthought. There was still and always will be a cottage industry for the conversation piece pipe or bubbler, but for the most part, the fad died.
Kulture leaned in on what they did best to compensate for the shift. Jimmy tapped into Twitter and started inviting touring artists to the shop before and after local gigs. Mac Miller, Wiz Khalifa, The Wailers, Post Malone, Action Bronson and others would become regular guests and friends, dropping for a smoke and a photo with the dudes. Tying this in to the power of social media cemented their rep as being players, once again elevating their stature above the fray of ‘head shops’ into the realm of cultural influencers. The brand was untethered from the products they sold and became an entity that projected connectedness, inclusion, and relevance. After a minute, the invites started to flow the opposite direction. It wasn’t weird to see their faces pop up in press photos alongside their new celebrity friends. That kind of exposure just feeds the infamy machine, one that was gassed up and ready to take on each maneuver in the industry.
This left room for branding accessory items like grinders, papers, and the like. A highlight, according to Jimmy, came in a Snoop Dogg’s video where you can clearly see their products on his desk. They went from a smoke shop to a brand. Merchandising for the win. Kulture mastered reading the room and applying their energy to thinking forward. Keeping their eyes on the horizon and not on the sidewalk in front of their feet. The hustler survives by anticipating and riding the wave, not by squaring up against it.
When asked to describe what qualities of the other that made Kulture a success, Jimmy had this to say of Evan:
“Leadership. Neither one of us went to college. We don’t have degrees in anything. We had to teach ourselves a lot of this stuff and what isn’t taught seems to be instinctual on a business level. We tripped up and fell sometimes but we stuck behind what we believed in. He had a great eye for what products we should be carrying, knew when to drop a failing concept and when to adopt a new one. I had worked in a corporate atmosphere for a couple years and understood the value of shelf space. The amount of money represented on any given square inch of retail space was the money that wasn’t in the bank account. Moving product and not letting anything stagnate in the store was an important concept to understand. We both got that pretty quickly. We understood that the customer doesn’t need a million choices. The way we curate negates the need for overrepresentation in options. We’re only going to carry the right option. Insights like these went a long way, and Evan is great about adhering to them.”
Evan of Jimmy:
“Three words. Gift. Of. Gab. He’s got the gift of gab in the streets. He’s talking to everybody on the music scene, local and nationally. That’s Jimmy. He’s just there. He’s present. Jimmy is seven days a week on the streets, forever. He knows everybody. A background in the service industry doesn’t hurt either. He’s a salesperson with a lot of charm. Not everybody can love you though, and you gotta be okay with that. If you’ve never heard ‘Fuck Jimmy,’ you’re lying.
You also can’t fully tell the story of Kulture without mentioning Jimmy’s brother George, who was instrumental in opening the West End location and has been a product specialist with us for fifteen years. Jimmy had everything he came with, including family.”
After climbing and dodging in the context of a small, regional retail chain, Evan and Jimmy were met with the opportunity to graduate from the limited concerns therein and move on up. The next step in the plan was to cut out the middle and begin making their own products and warehousing their own good. Instead of ordering from other shops, they decided to sell to them. They made all the accessories you could think of, including air filters and the aforementioned Snoop-preferred papers, to mention a couple. Evan also saw the opportunity to expand the business into the weed-adjacent wellness phenomenon of CBD products.
Kultivate Wellness, Evan’s answer to the holistic market surrounding non-THC products, opened up in 2018 but had its roots in a reaction to the 2014 Farm Bill Act.
“CBD and all of the non-intoxicating products became legal. It took a lot to weed out all the bad actors selling bullshit products, but we managed to do so. We identified the quality brands and were able to confidently stand behind what we were offering. We understood this market to be a bit averse to coexisting with the general weed paraphernalia we offered at Kulture. So we started a whole new thing. We spent a year just talking to farmers and suppliers, figuring out which relationships were going to be productive and provide quality. We put together our own product line and launched the first Southside store in 2018. We operated out of Short Pump as well, but had to move that store to NC – for reasons. We wanted to provide people with a healthier option than prescription pain, ADHD, or anxiety pills and the like.”
As the stores go into full cruise control mode, Jimmy and Evan can rest. Of course, they don’t. Because a hustler needs movement like a shark needs a stream through its gills. Whether flipping real estate or buying and selling estates, collectibles and jewelry, one thing will always be true. These two can’t stop and won’t stop. The first twenty-five years of Kulture have been a blast. The next might be atomic. We can’t wait to see what happens.
Main image courtesy of Kulture features Evan and Shannon Somogyi along with Jimmy Conway
